Twitter Downtime: As Bad As Everyone Says It Is

Twitter, the Web 2.0 messaging service people love to love and love to hate, gets frequent criticism for its frequent downtime. But unlike many inside-the-bubble memes, the complainers have a point: Twitter really is down a lot, at least according to new research from monitoring service Pingdom.

Twitter was down more than any of the other surveyed social networks for the first four months of the year – 37 hours, 16 minutes, meaning it was up 98.72% of the time. That was almost double the downtime of the second worst performing network, Reunion.com.

The good news: Twitter is actually getting better. According to Pingdom's last downtime survey, which covered February through December of last year, Twitter was out an average of 26.6 minutes per day. But over the first four months of this year, that numbers has shrunk to 18.5 minutes a day. But that won't assuage Twitter lover/haters, who are likely typing out 140-character demands for full and complete refunds this very minute.

The giant caveat: Pingdom is only measuring the performance of Twitter.com. And since a huge part of Twitter usage happens offsite (via APIs and mobile) it's hard to get a handle on the service's overall performance. But the Pingdom stats are better than the other, non-existent ones we have.